It happened again over the weekend.
I had a conversation with a bloke who runs a medium sized business, and is embarking on what he called a ‘digital transformation’.
In other words, he is paying someone to build a website.
Another example of someone who is probably about to be badly disappointed, and lighter in the pocket.
A website is not a digital transformation, it is a piece of marketing collateral, and like every other piece, needs to have met and passed a few basic tests:
What is its purpose?
Who is my customer?
How is it different to others in a similar space?
What problem does it solve?
How do you want visitors to feel?
What do you want those visitors to do next?
If that is not all obvious in the first glance, start again.
The greatest cost in building a website is not the technology, that is now almost completely commoditised, it is in the generation of the content in response to the answering of these simple questions. Failure to deliver to a site visitor something of value to them that creates at least curiosity to learn more from you, means they will leave, and probably never come back. While there is no dollar value to that outcome you can easily count, it is in reality the greatest cost in not having a site that works for you: lost opportunity and revenue.
